My website has a new look. Ever since last December I have been working on redesigning my website. I wanted a completely new, vibrant look that would showcase my work. I tried this and tried that with no real success. Everything I did looked like a very slight modification to the site and I kept asking myself, why bother? Then I started to search for CSS (techie talk for Cascading Style Sheets) templates and eventually came across a site called Themeforest.net **, that offered HTML templates and more. They had some really nice and very affordable ones. I eventually narrowed it down to this template by Pezflash.

**My apologies, due to certain restrictions, I cannot provide a link to Themeforest…, so if you would like to visit their site, you can type in the url or Google them.

What I wanted to achieve was a completely redesigned website that was different than anything I had ever had. With this template, I was able to get most of what I wanted. Yes, there are a few things I would like to change up a bit more, but over all the website is what I wanted with this revision.

I’m a techie, my day job is that of a software developer, so I have to tell you that if you buy a template, I really think you need to know a bit about coding, regardless of what the author may tell you. I’ve done website development for over 10 years now, mainly for myself, and I would be the first one to tell you that there are tons of things I don’t understand about web development. BUT, I guess I know enough to be ‘dangerous‘ AND I will tell you that I know what I like and I really liked what this template provided.

So, I had to do a bit of coding here and there. I definitely had my moments of frustration with this one, but not as many as in some of my previous excursions. My thoughts, after I had struggled for 5 months trying to achieve the redesign, were why reinvent the wheel when someone had the layout I wanted already coded? Now, I still want to tweak a few things, but it’s a great foundation for me to add content.

I hope you like the revisions as much as I do. I highly recommend the Themeforest site because of the wide variety of theme selections they offer at a very reasonable cost (average around $15 for a single site license). And Pezflash designs some great themes, provides good documentation and is available for questions if you have them. I think that ranks things at a 4 or 5 star level for style, support, etc. Just remember if you decide to go this route, you do need a fair amount of knowledge for the technical part of the code.

Now it’s time for me to get back to the bench to continue preparations for my next Trunk Show on Saturday, June 8th. Details in my latest newsletter. If you’d like to subscribe to my newsletter, sign up here. I promise you won’t be bombarded with endless emails. I send information out about new works or shows every month or two.

Make it a great Friday everyone!

Until next time, aspire to be more as an artist and a person.

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Kathleen Krucoff

Artist and Metalsmith

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